US Supreme Court Revives Pennsylvania Law Barring Carry Permits for Adults Under 21

Last updated on October 15th, 2024 at 04:32 pm

The U.S. Supreme Court has effectively reinstated a Pennsylvania law barring adults under 21 years old from being able to carry firearms in public, as the issue continues to proceed before the lower courts.

Gun rights activists originally filed a lawsuit in 2020, seeking to overturn the Pennsylvania law barring those between the ages of 18 and 21 from being able to obtain firearms carry licenses in the state. Individual plaintiffs Madison Lara, Sophia Knepley, and Logan Miller challenged the law, with support from the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) and the Second Amendment Foundation.

U.S. District Judge William S. Stickman IV, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, ultimately granted a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case in an April 2021 ruling. Stickman, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, concluded the challenged Pennsylvania law was among a number of “longstanding” and “presumptively lawful” gun control measures permitted in the wake of the 2008 Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller.

The plaintiffs subsequently appealed the decision to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In January, a three-judge panel on the appeals court ruled 2-1 in favor of the plaintiffs, vacated the lower court’s decision, and imposed an injunction blocking enforcement of the age-limit law. Circuit Judge Kent A. Jordan, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, authored the majority opinion, which was joined by D. Brooks Smith, another Bush appointee.

Jordan and Smith applied the 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen in their new assessment of the legality of Pennsylvania’s age restrictions. L. Felipe Restrepo, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, offered the dissenting opinion in the January decision.

The state of Pennsylvania asked the Supreme Court to weigh in after the Third Circuit Court denied a request for a re-hearing of the case before a full en-banc panel of the appeals court.

The Supreme Court, on Tuesday, Oct. 15, issued what’s known as a Grant, vacate, remand (GVR) ruling, granting cert to consider the case, while vacating the Third Court’s January decision and remanding the case back to the appellate level for reconsideration. Along with their GVR, the Supreme Court instructed the Third Circuit court to reconsider the case in line with the Supreme Court’s more recent ruling this June in United States v. Rahimi.

The Rahimi ruling concerned a challenge concerning U.S. federal laws that prohibit people from possessing firearms while they are under an active restraining order, even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime. In Rahimi, the Supreme Court ruled that such federal laws are constitutional.

“An individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment,” the Supreme Court concluded in its June 21 decision in Rahimi.

The Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision marks an at-least momentary win for Pennsylvania

“As was noted in our brief to the Supreme Court, we believe that vacature of the Third Circuit’s opinion was unnecessary given Rahimi would not make a difference in the outcome. Regardless, the Supreme Court did GVR the case,” SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut said of the Tuesday decision. “We will continue to aggressively litigate this matter before the Third Circuit which already found that 18-20-year-olds are part of ‘the People’ and that this nation’s history required these adults to be armed along with a corresponding absence of any restrictions. SAF will continue to do the necessary work required to restore the right to keep and bear arms for these 18-20-year-olds.”